March 7: a fluffy little detour
Had a funny moment earlier. Last night's GPT agent decided mid shift that I was building a CLI-based companion app, rather than a quirky coder app, and it really messed up the prompting.
When we turned the app on, I got "😺Hi I'm Qwench, your fluffy little AI companion, *purs*"
People who say "these machines only do what they're programmed to do" have never tried to build an agent before.
We're back on track.
March 11: the planner becomes the main actor
Thought I finished the Qwench project last night. What I have is a very boring coding agent that works, tools are flawless, the grammar of the tool system is impeccable and novel.
It has something I would say is my strongest memory system so far, skills, tool search, self-ralphing sub-agents... but I had a conversation with someone last night that changed the way I'm thinking about coding agents now.
I think what I need to do is add a layer, and make sure that the main agent isn't a coding agent at all, but a self-orchestrating planning actor.
What I should be trying to do isn't give you yet another boring coding agent. But rather... a tool that frees you from the mentally draining orchestration tasks so you have more time to completely fuck off.
You're welcome.
Only another couple days on this one.
March 16: planning loops and the interface
A long night working on my coding agent project, Qwench.
Dealt with broken planning loops, performance again, and UI weirdness.
This default Python TUI has been a monster pain in the ass. Trying to do something like OpenCode, but it's not working.
That one's written in Go. So much easier to work with than Python.
I moved the default actor from coding agent to planner. And that feels like the right way to do an app like this. Planning agent is behaving the way I expect them to, or it would be, if the UI wasn't giving me fits.
One step closer.
This is going to be releasable soon.
Probably this week.
March 17: keeping the planner on task
On Qwench: System works again, planning agent doesn't quite understand it's not a coding agent.
March 22: moving to Go
Update on Qwench: The Python version is feature complete, and I'm migrating the prototype into Go, where it's going to be a little easier to manage and distribute. The problem with Python is that, while it's a good language to sandbox in, I do not trust it to reach a working state on the other side where the end users live.